Tallest Objects   Wildflowers one knuckle high. Mammals the width of a hand gather bouquets in their mouths, pile them in havens between stones.   Each human gesture weighted with layers of fleece and wool, zippers and eider-down.   A kilometre above sea-level, we are the tallest objects bent by the wind.   Wide-legged gait...

Concepción, Chile   When they take her from the street she shouts her full name so someone might record her disappearance. They shut her up. Her articles are measured and weighed. For months they guard her, abbreviate her verbs. They keep her in the imperative. She is strip-searched, shocked, revived. Sprayed down with rhetoric. They...

Each Winter Every Winter   The house holds winter over its head on a book, the covers its roof, and us, the pages within. The book stillness rising, a fat sky wedge plowing upwards, as the snow rotates down, a repeated background on vertical scroll.   Winter bringing yesterwinter, piled onto by the winter before,...

MOTEL 6   They climb the rust belt stairs Boots heavy on threaded steel The father walks ahead and the young boy follows as the smoke from his father’s cigarette mingles with the cold prairie air.   They stop in front of their motel room Father leaning over the railing ledge Starting at the parking...

In Leduc, Alberta, there's a man on a job. He's selling farm insurance under a bow-legged tent. He's heckling my boots, oh good, he's heckling. At this truck stop, where this man is working, the only other visible woman is working the bar. This truck stop where I am not woman enough, but where I...

Hour Twenty   Bowel seized, Iron Maiden, tailbone swinging like a trap door.   Stuck in this swamp I bathe in my juices. Early afternoon melts   hardwood into honeyed strips. I have douched enough, fermented in sauce   of amniotic piss, the drug of heat has worn. I am combustible. Walls coat ashen, baptized....

Burning Down The House   Gregory Crewdson, Twilight: Plate 11, 2002, digital print of 8x10 glass negative   he walks two three times around the gas can slouched on his heels the building crackling his two teenage daughters stuck in a game of risk on the hood of the family station wagon ‘you might not...

Spiritual Media: Follow this Poem   Directives: @ShopprsDrugMart pharmacists as primary care #yourlifestore #youregonnabehappy   @VCHhealthcare urban physicians and their atrophied skills #carepointclinic   @seroquelXR05 anti-psychotics—even in sub-therapeutic does— can stop your period #mypsychiatristsaysihaveexcellentboundaries   Histoire du livre   Everyone you’ve ever known seems a monotheist, eyes entranced by this dynamic book. And you, I...

I Forgot To Mention the Thunderball   The day I stepped through my Etch a Sketch signaled the end of an era. Over were the evenings my father would lie belly-down on the rumpus room rug, propped on his elbows winding mini-mazes for me to solve, as I counted bunnies on his Pilsner bottle. All...

What’s Shaken from the Sun   We dream our ideals into each day, wake within some souvenir of failure, vacation in a lovely schmutz of laughter. Confounded by fuck-ups and shoddy directions, we hovel respite from the pits. We dream our ideals into each day. Compounded by weaks and yearns, time pummels our expressions. Our...

the cutthroat's wishlist   crept in to covered spaces, crawled in anywhere, became punctured with hidden, felt up and abandoned   memory loss, if reconstructed in a three dimensional way ship steers, bucks left uncoiled and repulsed   if you were to look back at the crux of the ocean the dividing line, the long...